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[3man75]

I stumbled on this video a while back called "Humans need not apply" Link

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

an later found a machine known as the Godel machine that is said to learn on it's self and even rewrite it's own code. The very idea that a computer can be made to be creative and solve it's own problems without making a new code or new machine entirely is very intriguing to me but I was hoping there were some professionals on here who could tell me more about how it works.

Also Could machines phase out human brain power to the point of unemploying millions of people? I find it hard to understand what would happen if so many people got laid off and needed new jobs (again) but couldn't because everything was already automated.

[itisnotlogical]

Robots are an endless source of (basically) free labor, once the infrastructure is in place. The only people that need to get paid would be technicians who develop and maintain the robots (and their factories, support workers, delivery men, etc) which would be a much smaller number than it takes to run an entire supply chain from the farm all the way to the restaurant. That's the cost of food driven way, way down. If there are ever such a thing as volunteer maintenance technicians, then nobody would need to pay for food. Again, once the infrastructure is in place, which it will not be for many decades, if it ever gains mainstream acceptance (which it won't, but everybody is allowed one impossible dream).

[LordBucket]

Could machines phase out human brain power to the point of unemploying millions of people?

Easily. They don't need to be capable of replacing everything to unemploy dozens of millions of people. A great deal of out "knowledge work" is easily automatable. For example, lawyers. The majority of legal work is not standing in a courtroom. It's legal research of previous cases to find precedents. It's writing up contracts, which routinely are entirely formulaic. It's paperwork and and due diligence and sending out subpoenas and cease and desist orders and the like.

The majority of that doesn't require standing in court room talking to people. It's paperwork that could largely be automated.

A lot of "knowledge work" has significant elements of this type of work. Most of what loan officers do could be automated with software. There are over a million tax preparers in the US. Most of their jobs could be automated. Teachers? Sorry, in this day and age with the internet and online courses, a great many of those jobs could be automated. Sure, maybe not all of them. But it doesn't need to be all of them. Oxford University did a study that concluded that 47% of all jobs were at risk of being automated.

There would likely be a problem long before that 47% is reached.

I find it hard to understand what would happen if so many people got laid off and needed new jobs (again) but couldn't because everything was already automated.

Here are the standard predictions/theories I hear:

1. It will all work out because it has in the past. New technology creates new jobs. Look at the industrial revolution. People who lost their farm jobs moved to factories. They couldn't predict that those factory jobs would be created, but they were. So new jobs that we also can't predict will probably also be created. No, I don't know what, because I can't predict it. Usually proponents of this theory talk about education a lot.

2. Universal Basic Income. You're right. We can automate production. And you're also right: who buys the products if nobody has any money to buy them? Solution: just hand out money to everyone to keep the system running.

3. The lower classes will revolt and overthrow the evil rich people. Because rich people are evil and deserve to die. Then what happens, who knows. But we killed the rich people and that's good enough.

4. The evil rich people won't need the peasants anymore, and will use killer robots to eliminate them. Never mind the fact that they probably don't care and it doesn't actually solve the problem. Usually something about overpopulation is mentioned at this point.

5. Class polarization. The peasants don't have the power to revolt, and the elites don't care enough to kill them. So the elites live lives of luxury and the peasants band together in tent cities and eventually form their own society.

6. Star Trek. It would only take the invention of a molecular disassembler/reassembler to render the whole money/economy/employment question mostly irrelevant. Imagine going into your back yard, scooping up a bucket full of dirt, rock and grass trimming. Now imagine dumping it into your machine, then downloading schematics for whatever you want. Say, a chocolate cake. You then push a button. Dirt and grass becomes chocolate cake. If you can use one of those machines to duplicate themselves, then the first few are built and sold commercially. Then people start duplicating them and handing them out to their neighbors. Money becomes pointless.

7. Similar to 6 could be implemented with proper use of robot manufacturing that we already have rather than requiring atomic assemblers. For example, if robots mine the materials used by robots to create the goods that drones then deliver, you use, and then robots pick up the trash and recycle it...there isn't much need for a money economy in that scenario. These theories usually discuss "energy credits" and the rationing of resources, but realistically once you have the robots doing everything, there isn't really any shortage of power or materials.

8. Stronger socialism, to varying degrees. For example, rather than handing out cash and letting people figure things out, you could possibly have the government own the robots and use them to build houses and food, and then ration them out to people. Or you could assign people pointless jobs, like one guy gets hired to push the button to build the thing, and another guy gets hired to push the button to destroy that thing, and then they're both employed so you give them money to buy the thing built by the third guy. Everyone's employed, everyone has money, everyone eats.

9. Destroy the machines, return to a semi-primitive state.

10. Craftsman economy. People will no longer work "jobs" but instead will make hand crafted knick-knacks and sell them to each other and somehow that will solve everything.

11. It won't happen. Look at ATMs. Since they've been introduced there are actually more people employed as bank tellers. Automation doesn't destroy jobs. It creates jobs.

12. Reduce work hours and adjust wages upward to solve the problem. If there are 10 people and 400 hours of work to be done, each of them can have 40 hours of work. So long as those 40 hours of work pay enough to keep them alive and happy, that's ok. If automation replaces 200 of those hours, then simply have the people work 20 hours each, but pay them the same amount.

13. Corporations can take over welfare roles previously assigned to government. The market may naturally evolve in this direction. For example, right now you probably have email, web search and driving direction services provided for you free of charge by corporations. If you want to post something to craigslist, you no longer pay for it like you might once have in a newspaper. If you want to buy a house, you can do that research for free. Many things are provided free of charge by corporations, and they make their money elsewhere. If it became cheap enough to provide things like houses and food, it's conceivable that they could be provided at no cost to the consumer. For example, there's discussion that google might choose to make their upcoming robot taxis and project loon internet access available free of charge.

[i2amroy]

-snip-

Pretty much. (Though personally having seen some of the stuff my parents do as lower grade teachers I don't foresee the removal of teachers from at least the pre-high school age schools too much. Now school administrators... ).

[alway]

I stumbled on this video a while back called "Humans need not apply" Link

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

an later found a machine known as the Godel machine that is said to learn on it's self and even rewrite it's own code. The very idea that a computer can be made to be creative and solve it's own problems without making a new code or new machine entirely is very intriguing to me but I was hoping there were some professionals on here who could tell me more about how it works.

Also Could machines phase out human brain power to the point of unemploying millions of people? I find it hard to understand what would happen if so many people got laid off and needed new jobs (again) but couldn't because everything was already automated.

On the first bit: The most fundamental step to understanding it is simply this: Code is data. The very instructions a compute executes are data just like any other. It all comes down to how you interpret it. In the case of code, it is fed into some (generally) Turing Complete machine (there are lots of Turing Complete machines, but it basically boils down to a general question of 'can it support the basic building blocks of computation'), which somehow uses its hardware to transform the input data (code, other information from other places) into output data.

An extremely basic example of self modifying code is a simple, everyday 'if' statement. Take the following:

Code: [Select]

if( a < b ) then { a = 5; }
display( a );
In the computer, this would translate to some machine language; which can be directly represented as assembly code, and is stored in the computer as data.

Code: [Select]

Code Address:    Instruction Type:       Result:   Input 1:     Input 2:
000                 IF NOT LESS THAN       002         A             B
001                    SET VALUE           A           5             0
002                  DISPLAY VALUE         0           A             0
Now, all that code is there, all in a row in the computer's memory. The computer hardware then goes one instruction at a time, feeding one set of commands after another through, grabbing associated data as needed. But what about that if statement? Well, if the statement was true (if a < b) then it will continue linearly, executing all 3 commands in order. If it was false, it modifies its Program Counter; that's the value in its memory that tells it where to load code from; and goes straight to command 002 instead of 001 after executing command 000. This same trick is how loops work: the computer gets to a command which tells it to jump backwards in its list of commands to execute, running them multiple times until some other command tells it to escape from the loop (or doesn't, in the case of an infinite loop).

Self modifying code is a similar idea; because those commands are stored as just plain old data on the hard drive with the rest of it, you can load up whatever you want from the hard drive and try to execute it. In fact, that's how your OS works. When you start up your computer, a tiny program on your motherboard starts up first. Its job is to do specifically this, and the hardware is put together in such a way as to ensure this program runs when it is started. This is what your computers BIOS system is. When you install an OS, what you're really doing is copying the OS files to the hard drive and telling BIOS where the commands for the OS are so it can do it's thing, then finish by doing a jump command into the location where the OS' list of commands start. Or if the NSA gave you a particularly nasty virus, it boots into their software, then that boots your OS.

As such, any of this 'just data' that makes up everything from Minecraft to your OS can be modified just like any other data. DLLs are a big example of that; a program begins to run, then based on the environment variables, detects which additional third party code it needs, and grabs that from some known folder location like System32. Ex: Are we running on an NVidia card or an AMD card? NVidia? Better load the NVidia DLLs then; we will need those to run our graphics stuff.

Essentially what it comes down to is that you can think of everything running on your computer as a single program, that tiny BIOS program on your motherboard, which has modified its code using data on the hard drive to do everything you want it to do. None of that code is fixed in place at runtime; though it may be copied somewhere convenient for the OS; and so long as the OS doesn't obstruct you for security reasons, you can modify it as it is running.

Of course, none of this is specifically what you were asking, but it is rather a view from which to realize that a computer acting on its own code is no different or complication than modifying an image in paint. From there, it's just a quick hop to see that using a machine to analyze and modify its own code is no different from writing a program to analyze and find optimal solutions to traffic problems, or similar things. The details can be tricky, and generally fall into various machine learning stuffs like Metaheuristics (an optimizer run on an optimization function) or Hyperheuristics (an optimizer which designs or chooses optimization functions).

As for the second bit, in the US alone, Taxi Cabs are an 11 billion dollar annually, employing 180,000 people. http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes533041.htm
In the US alone, Truck Drivers are a $700 Billion dollar industry, employing 1.7 million people.
http://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/heavy-and-tractor-trailer-truck-drivers.htm
http://www.joc.com/trucking-logistics/truckload-freight/annual-us-trucking-revenue-tops-700-billion-first-time_20150511.html
Between these two, that's over 1% of the US labor market. Additionally, the latter is a backbone of many rural areas, and makes big contributions to the existence of things like truck stops.
Well, self driving cars and trucks now exist, and within a decade or so could wipe out nearly all of both of those industries. Both Uber and Google know that; that's why they're both pouring billions into self driving car R&D. And that's hardly the only sector these changes are coming to.

[LordBucket]

Self modifying code isn't even necessary for the issues discussed in Humans Need Not Apply...to apply. Personally I suspect we could have had a "Star Trek" style society even with 1970s technology if we simply made the right cultural changes. A lot of job that exist are pointless. In some cases we deliberately design things to be obtuse, and to require human effort for no good reason. There are over a million tax preparers in the US. They could all be eliminated and replaced with some very simple automation if the tax code wasn't completely stupid. Or look at cashiers and bank tellers. We've had ATMs since the 60s, and automated checkout for almost ten years. And yet both cashiers and bank tellers have increased since the devices were introduced that could be replacing them. And I've eaten in Japanese conveyor belt restaurants, and "order from a vending machine" restaurants where there's one employee in the entire building.

We could automate a great deal of work with these machines, but we've collectively chosen not to. Will that change? I don't know. I'd like it to. I see little value in requiring the majority of society to engage in pointless tasks.

[wierd]

Similar with low end healthcare workers. (Nurse aids, etc.)  There most certainly is room for personal assistance robots (Think things like mobility rigs, etc.) but that does not really help people who are old, and now are lonely and need somebody to talk to. As powerful as robots get, there is always going to be the issue of weather or not the robot actually CARES about people, or if it just does what the majority of humans perceive as caring.

Entry level healthcare deals with this psychological requirement more than you likely realize.

[Bohandas]

Oxford University did a study that concluded that 47% of all jobs were at risk of being automated.

Is that imminemt risk? Because if not that sounds kind of low.

[LordBucket]

Is that imminemt risk? Because if not that sounds kind of low.

The study was a comparison of the relative distribution of jobs by difficulty of automating them, not a prediction of likelihood of automation of any specific job. They do give a prediction of "maybe 10-20 years" but it was very off the cuff, rather than directly supported by the data. The more precise way to phrase it would be: "if you sort all professions by how difficult they are to automate, the job distribution is such that 47% of actual jobs are in professions that are among the top 30% easiest to automate."

The professions that are easy to automate tend to employ more people overall than professions that are more difficult to automate. For example, physical therapists are probably difficult to replace with machines, ut there are only 204,000 physical therapists in the US. Whereas cashiers are probably very easy to replace with automation. but there are 3.4 million cashiers.

So they're not saying that these "professions will probably be automated" so much as they're saying that if they're automated, "disproportionately many  jobs are at risk from that automation." It's assumed in the study that the easy-to-automate jobs probably will be automated, but that conclusion is not precisely what the study was about.

[wierd]

This seems strangely apropos.



Good old despair inc...  Where would we be without them?

[Eagleon]

We've had ATMs since the 60s, and automated checkout for almost ten years. And yet both cashiers and bank tellers have increased since the devices were introduced that could be replacing them.

I've worked on self-checkouts. There are enormous amounts of problems that have to be watched for simply for the fact that people are not always honest, there are clever scams that are passed around amongst other scammers (granted the best involve a bit of social engineering), and some things (produce, other bulk items) need to be weighed. Those scales break down fast when people slam 20 lbs of kitty litter down on them etc, the weight of items vary, the scanners get dirty, the techs contracted to repair them get shat on so that our repairs would come in late due to 14 hour work days, and in general they were a literal pain in the ass due to the amount of joint vs. muscle work being done (turning, bending, twisting, because people will not move out of your way even though your entire body feels like it's boiling). There's a reason people still go to registers, and a reason cashiers hate self-checkouts besides the dey tuk our jerbs factor. I imagine bank tellers have similar stories.

If you really want to automate retail, put an RFID chip in everything and a magnetic hoop at the exit that scans your entire cart in one go and unlocks the front turnstile if you feed it money. All that would be left are stockers, cleaners, receiving (if you didn't automate this, which wouldn't be that hard) and someone to watch the cameras for people fishing the RFIDs out.

[Bohandas]

We've had ATMs since the 60s, and automated checkout for almost ten years. And yet both cashiers and bank tellers have increased since the devices were introduced that could be replacing them.

I've worked on self-checkouts. There are enormous amounts of problems that have to be watched for simply for the fact that people are not always honest, there are clever scams that are passed around amongst other scammers (granted the best involve a bit of social engineering), and some things (produce, other bulk items) need to be weighed. Those scales break down fast when people slam 20 lbs of kitty litter down on them etc, the weight of items vary, the scanners get dirty, the techs contracted to repair them get shat on so that our repairs would come in late due to 14 hour work days, and in general they were a literal pain in the ass due to the amount of joint vs. muscle work being done (turning, bending, twisting, because people will not move out of your way even though your entire body feels like it's boiling). There's a reason people still go to registers, and a reason cashiers hate self-checkouts besides the dey tuk our jerbs factor. I imagine bank tellers have similar stories.

If you really want to automate retail, put an RFID chip in everything and a magnetic hoop at the exit that scans your entire cart in one go and unlocks the front turnstile if you feed it money. All that would be left are stockers, cleaners, receiving (if you didn't automate this, which wouldn't be that hard) and someone to watch the cameras for people fishing the RFIDs out.

Or just scale up a vending machine